Friday, 13 March 2015

This post follows from an earlier
one in which I discuss general issues of resource scarcity and the lack of
danger from decomposing bodies (unless, of course, they are zombies...). Here,
I focus on issues specific to common apocalypse scenarios.

pandemic

As mentioned in the general issues post (i.e. Part I),
bodies would cease to be contagious pretty quickly. Authors have a lot of room
here, however, to make interesting scenarios in which diseases caused by
retroviruses (for example), remain undetectable in a living host for long
periods of time. This sets up dramatic possibilities with regard to survivors
being xenophobic. In addition to supplying a canvas for conflict, it shatters
the idea that large groups would form to reorganize society. If you want
dwindling resources, city-states, and tribal conflict, this seems like a good
way to go in a pandemic scenario.

zombie apocalypse

What Anne Rice did for vampires, Max
Brooks did for zombies (in my mind, he modernized the genre). If you are
writing a zombie story and you have not yet read The Zombie Survival Guide or World
War Z, you are shooting yourself in the foot. While Brooks’ zombies violate
all biological and thermodynamic principles, even I (who gets hung up on such
things) was able to put those matters aside to enjoy the extent of his
thinking. Really – go and get these books (the movie doesn’t do them justice,
though I have been told that The Walking
Dead television series does bring Brooks’ contribution to the screen).

nuclear holocaust

Wm.
Robert Johnston, a researcher in space-physics, wrote a well-considered seminar
piece in which he detailed the likely effects of a fictional nuclear holocaust
in 1988. While the conclusions are surprising to me, they confirm what the
majority of experts claim: that much (perhaps half) of the world’s population
would survive[1]. I recommend the
report for its straight-forward usefulness. Another good, albeit earlier, paper
is “The global health effects of nuclear war” by physicist Brian Martin[2].

Johnston estimates 45 million US
survivors (around 16%, or 1 in 6), so there will be plenty of people to build
up local governments that can oversee production and distribution of resources
and labor. An interesting consideration is that, even though the nuclear
destruction will be targeted at a limited number of countries, it is likely
that several smaller conflicts will erupt as the world’s power balance is
reassessed.

Cities, of course, will be the
primary target of most attacks. Therefore, most of the amenities of
infrastructure (industry, bureaucracy, communication, etc.) will be gone,
making this scenario very different from the pandemic apocalypse. Yet, scavenging in areas outside of the
epicentres will still provide a largess food that will keep people alive until
they can reorganize (packaged or tinned foods will be safe so long as the
radioactive dust has not mixed into the contents).

The ramifications of a nuclear
holocaust are vast and complicated. I recommend that writers hoping to do justice
to their speculative world draw on multiple sources before considering the
scale at which they want their fabula to take place. The scale will determine
what details need to be considered and which can be glossed over with
hand-wavey vagaries.

alien invasion

If you are looking for realism,
this one is most certainly a punt. If a race of creatures has the ability to
cross the galaxy, then there is no good reason for them to dominate Earth. We
have virtually nothing here that is not available elsewhere, especially water
(in his book, The Eerie Silence [3], Paul Davies
does such a good job tackling the search for alien intelligence that I
abandoned my plans to write such a book after reading his). Furthermore, a race
that has the technology for interstellar travel could probably make anything
that it needs from scratch, would likely find human slave-labor to be more
trouble than it’s worth and, because it did not co-evolve with us, would
probably not find us to be suitable hosts for their young or for hybridization.

The invasion could be a less-insidious
wave of spores spreading out through the galaxy to colonize new planets, but
that has a few evolutionary issues. The first is that the critters would have needed
to evolve on a planet whose conditions selected for (i.e. rewarded) those variants that were somehow cast out into
space. Perhaps they evolved on an asteroid, but complex beings are complex because they evolve in multi-faceted
relationships with their ecology (i.e.
other critters that evolved next to them). If they are good at colonizing and
competing with local flora and fauna, it implies that they got good at it over
millions of years of interactions with their shipmates (or asteroid-mates). The take-home message is that, to evolve a highly-capable colonising creature, you need a complex ecology (not teh kind usually depicted on asteroids).

The
second issue is that, when something evolves to live on a planet, it is
rewarded for being really good at exploiting that planet. Even on our own planet, only around 10% of introduced
species take hold in their new environments, and only 1% become problematic
pests[4]. What would the chances be if they came
from an alien climate and atmosphere?

As always, I am not suggesting
that alien-invasion plots be abandoned; I am only suggesting that authors patch
up the obvious holes before their readers point them out on a forum site.

Lovecraftian horrors and their ilk

Who doesn’t love a good
Cthulhu-esque tale? Sentient, terrible forces conquering our world from within
the shadows. Perhaps without Lovecraft, there would have never been an X-Files. The big problem is that these
stories usually rely on unbelievably competent conspiracies and an equally
incompetent scientific community. Having been a biologist for years, I know how
quickly good evidence is disseminated
and taken seriously. When a tentacled, vampiric, flying werewolf ate the local
sheriff, did that really go unnoticed
by everyone except for the local high school heroes and the stodgy librarian? Especially
with the aid of current global communication, it only takes the stodgy
librarian sending a photo attachment of the creature before interests would be piqued.
Maybe the poor old dear would be eaten before others began to take him seriously,
but information gets around and, once it is confirmed as being something new,
the entire global scientific community goes ape (if discovery of a new species
of frog got a 839 words in the New York
Times[5], then the discovery
of said werewolf would not be tucked away in a file). This is my usual first
filter for conspiracy stories in real life. If an average citizen can find
evidence that they are using to demonstrate an incredible cover-up, then I
regard it as just that: in-credible. Why is the entire astrophysics community
ignoring the webpage that clearly presents evidence of an alien in a ‘government’
freezer? Because they know better.

Act of god(s)

Knock yourselves out, folks --
it’s hard to make less sense than what many religious readers actually believe to be the final fate of
the world.

References:

[1]

W. Johnston, "The
effects of a global thermonuclear war.," in Dean's Scholars seminar,
University of Texas at Austin, 2003.

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About Me

I taught
science for more than 20 years at the university level (and to general
audiences) before moving to London. I recently finished an MSc in Science Communication and am attempting to break into science and factual media presentation.